Intel, an old chip giant with earlier development, once dominated the chip industry for more than 20 years, until 2017, Samsung with its memory chip advantage, surpassed Intel to win the global market laurels, last year TSMC with foundry to the top.
Since last year, affected by the decline in chip demand and chip restrictions, Intel's performance has fallen the most, Samsung and TSMC seem to be stronger because of the advantages of foundry, but recently the news came, the two chip giants can not stand it!
First, let's look at Samsung. Although Samsung has been controlled by TSMC in terms of wafer foundry, it seems that it can only be the second oldest in a thousand years, but it is outstanding in memory chips, and the market share of the two series of storage is the first in the world.
Although TSMC accounts for more than half of the wafer foundry market share, chip manufacturing technology is also better than Samsung, but because of the large amount of memory chips, according to the overall chip production capacity, Samsung is the world's first, far ahead of TSMC.
Therefore, TSMC is also eyeing the storage business, and has also strengthened storage technology cooperation with Micron and SK Hynix.
Samsung has dominated the DRAM memory market for 30 years, with a market share of more than 40%; In the NAND flash memory market, Samsung has also ranked first for 20 consecutive years, with a market share of more than 30%, which shows how powerful Samsung storage is.
However, it is precisely because Samsung's share of memory chips is too large, the price of memory chips has soared in previous years, so Samsung surpassed Intel in revenue to become the world's first, but last year began to continue to decline in demand and price of memory chips.
Affected by this, Samsung is naturally the manufacturer with the biggest loss. As the saying goes, Samsung is also stored, and defeat is also stored.
The situation of the chip industry this year is still not optimistic, and the situation of the expected improvement in the second half of the year is still unclear. As a result, Samsung's performance plummeted. Recently, Samsung announced its first quarter performance report, and profits plummeted by 96% year-on-year.
This is the lowest in 14 years after the 2009 financial crisis, in order to avoid a further decline in performance, Samsung changed its decision not to reduce production and announced a reduction in memory chip production, which is Samsung's first storage production reduction in 25 years.
And the magnitude of the reduction is likely to increase further in the future. It can be seen that Samsung really can't stand it this time.
Secondly, the standout is in terms of TSMC. TSMC has made the wafer foundry business a global leader, coupled with the global shortage of cores in the past two years, TSMC has made a lot of money, surpassing Intel and Samsung to become the world's first last year.
In terms of wafer foundry, TSMC can be described as a peerless ride, not a little ahead of its peers, and its market share has approached 60%. In terms of chip manufacturing technology, although Samsung has followed, TSMC's yield and stability are better.
Because, Apple, AMD, MediaTek and other giants are TSMC's customers, and Qualcomm and Nvidia have also transferred orders from Samsung.
As a result, TSMC is more resilient than other foundries, and TSMC's performance was still rising when second-tier fabs began to suffer in the second half of last year, and it was still the case in January and February this year. However, the decline began to occur in March.
Recently, TSMC announced its March results, revenue fell 10.9% compared with February, 15.4% from March last year, and revenue in the first quarter did not meet expectations, down 14-18% from the fourth quarter of last year.
It can be seen that TSMC, even if its wafer foundry strength is very strong, it has begun to be affected by the weak economy and declining demand.
Not only that, market assessment agencies are also not optimistic about TSMC's performance this year, and once again lowered their revenue expectations for the second quarter. Previously, TSMC was expected to decline by about 4% in the second quarter, but now this range has been raised to 5-9%.
The reason is that the demand for PCs and mobile phones is still declining, and customers such as Apple and MediaTek will continue to reduce orders in the future. Recent survey data shows that PC shipments in the first quarter of this year fell 29% year-on-year, of which Apple shipments fell 40% year-on-year.
TSMC has always said that the market will improve in the second half of the year, but according to relevant forecasts, there will be no V-shaped reversal in the second half of the year.
Therefore, Morgan Stanley said that TSMC's 7nm, 4nm, and 3nm production capacity may decline, and it is expected that TSMC's capital expenditure will be at the lower limit of $32 billion to $36 billion this year, and will fall to $30 billion in 2024.
Not only that, Samsung and TSMC are also facing the problem of building factories in the United States, because applying for US chip subsidies will face a number of harsh terms, restricting their development in the mainland, which has increased their future development.
Based on the above situation, some foreign media commented that the two chip giants TSMC and Samsung could not stand it!